2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

How do contexts of war and militarism interact with portrayals of female power in U.S. and Canadian popular culture from the 1910s to the present? This interdisciplinary panel investigates the relationship between female fantasy figures, their waxing and waning powers, and the war cultures that have helped to define gender since the 1910s.

Susan Lewis and Emily Hamilton-Honey explore the representation of female power on the pages of girls’ series books popular during World War I. Lewis examines the range of problems faced (and surmounted) by heroines in the pre-war Patty Fairfield series (1901-1918) to the wartime Somewhere (1918-1919), Khaki Girls (1918-1920), and Captain Lucy (1918-1921) series. Hamilton-Honey focuses on heroine Ruth Fielding in Ruth Fielding Series who is allowed to transgress the gender boundaries that would constrain her in peacetime, but only because she does so under the aegis of military supervisors. Jane Glaubman examines the adoption of English medieval fantasy by technical workers in the U.S. defense industry in the 1960s, revealing the hybrid fantasies used to mediate repression and aggression on the eve of the sexual revolution. And Anne Rubenstein traces a history of magical young women in television shows from the 1960s, when heroines with “near-infinite” power were “contained” within heterosexual domesticity, through the post-Cold War Buffy, to magical heroines of the War on Terror, for whom the “containment” of female power is ascribed to a racialized enemy.